I cover energy and the environment for Forbes and teach journalism and argument at the University of Chicago. My work has appeared under the banner of dailies including the Chicago Tribune and Arizona Republic, alternative weeklies including Newcity and New Times, journals including PEN International Magazine. I was born on the South Side of Chicago and live there now, but two of my nine lives were spent in Arizona and California—a third on the meander. This site collects feeds from the places I publish, and I’ve collected a few clips here that have stood out over the years like, for example, my first.

The Powers That Be may not heed our protests, read our letters, listen to our environmental groups, but they can’t stop us from taking back the thousands of dollars we inadvertently contribute to their polluting economy every year.Read at Forbes…>

It would be almost three hours until Tesla’s big announcement, but inside a Northwestern University classroom near Chicago Thursday night, the famed nuclear critic Arnie Gundersen had the inside scoop: Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk was about to announce an industrial-scale battery, Gundersen said, that would cost about 2¢ per kilowatt hour to use, putting the final nail in the coffin of nuclear power.

This is the story of the broken heart of a man, the rusty heart of a city, and how they got all tangled up as one. Like a lot of us, he learned hope and heartbreak first from a baseball team, then from bruising bouts with love, then from the city in which he lived, but unlike a lot of us, he never learned to play along, never stopped seeing the way things are contrasted against the way things ought to be, never stopped championing the nobodies nobody knows—for there, he wrote, beats Chicago’s heart. He followed his own beat straight to the place where pride will lead you every time—to poverty and exile—while describing Chicago as no one had since Carl Sandburg and as no one has again. And save for the devotion of a peculiar few, the City of Big Shoulders shrugged him off.

Less than three years after the U.S. Cavalry massacred the Sioux at Wounded Knee, Chicagoans could safely observe Sioux encampments at the World’s Columbian Exposition, and the science of ethnography was born. So goes the story, and so it will go with socialists.

As soon as the last socialist dies – which might happen soon in Cuba – we will study them as curiosities, celebrate them as nostalgic objects, observe them through some modern version of a Columbian Exposition exhibit. It has already begun with Che Guevara: four years ago Gael García Bernal portrayed Che’s formative years in The Motorycle Diaries, and soon we will be able to safely observe the revolutionary Che, played by Benicio Del Toro, in a 268-minute biopic by Steven Soderbergh. We can watch while wearing our Original Che Berets, on sale right now at the Che Store for only $24.99 – $5.00 off the regular price. I will celebrate Che as much as the next subject of capital, but when I think of socialism I will not think of Che. I will think of Lozandro Polanco. [click to continue…]

It sounds like science fiction: a previously unknown insect with an appetite for electrical circuitry appears at a Houston-area chemical plant and marches toward the Johnson Space Center, defying human attempts to stop it with conventional weapons.

“I think we ought to be in panic mode,” said Tom Rasberry, the Pearland-Texas exterminator who was the first to battle the unidentified species that has informally taken his name: the crazy rasberry ant. “I’m not one of these people who panic about anything, but this is something that I really do think we should panic about it.”[click to continue…]

It isn’t hard to love a town for its greater and its lesser towers, its pleasant parks or its flashing ballet. Or for its broad and bending boulevards, where the continuous headlights follow, one dark driver after the next, one swift car after another, all night, all night and all night. But you never truly love it till you can love its alleys too. Where the bright and morning faces of old familiar friends now wear the anxious midnight eyes of strangers a long way from home. — From Nelson Algren’s “Chicago: City on the Make”

Staff members at the University of Arizona’s Radiation Control Center routinely discard in dumpsters up to 30,000 vials a month that once contained radioactive substances, and may still contain small amounts…

Energy efficiency is widely regarded as the least costly source for more energy, the most immediate way to reduce carbon emissions, a crucial part of any plan to achieve climate goals and advance a clean economy. Warning: this post contains football metaphors.

2018 was the year of residential energy storage, according to a leading analyst, as well as the year that grid-level batteries broke out of early adopter states and began appearing in places that might once have seemed unlikely.

Scientists are close to monitoring the greenhouse-gas emissions of individual cities, according to the Stanford University professor who chairs the Global Carbon Project, and soon after should be able to trace emissions to individual sources.

Energy Department researchers see enough promise in the battery in your flashlight, and the one under the hood of that rusting junker in your front yard, that they've put them on the list of cheaper, safer, more reliable successors to lithium-ion.

The amenities that have vanished from airlines in recent years—swift departures, comfortable seats, fine dining—are appearing on premium bus lines that are competing with airlines on amenities and eco-friendliness.

A Self Made of Words by Carl H. Klaus Iowa, 2013 Recently a Buddhist acquaintance suggested I read Simone Weil because of her work on attention. She writes, for example, that “Absolute undivided attention is prayer,” which lends a Buddhist flavor to her Judeo-Christian theology. Attention can be aimed at anything, after all, not necessarily […]

Since Roger Ebert died I’ve been watching the tribute writers struggle to express his contribution. At The Atlantic, Christopher Orr rightly describes Ebert as a movie enthusiast, but here’s the analysis that follows: “The movies he loved, he truly loved. And the movies he hated, he truly hated.” That’s so truly true Orr can reuse it for […]

It wasn’t the great science fiction novels, “Fahrenheit 451” or “The Martian Chronicles,” that most reflected Ray Bradbury’s life, but a play he wrote—”Something Wicked This Way Comes”— “It’s a metaphor for all of life,” Bradbury said of his play, which you may know better as a 1983 movie starring Jonathan Pryce, Jason Robards and […]

[capti on id=”attachment_2694″ align=”alignright” width=”300″ caption=”By fox_kiyo via flickr”][/caption] When we published the summer issue of Contrary two days ago, we had less than $2 in the bank. We’ve been scraping by since the recession hit, but this marked the first time we had published an issue without knowing how we’d pay for it. Scary, […]

Lauren Berlant speaking on media sensationalism? I couldn’ t miss that. So I found my way to the University of Chicago’s Gleacher Center to have a listen. Only to find out I’d overlooked the comma between media and sensationalism. Lauren Berlant is an English professor at the University of Chicago, but that title can’t contain […]

Juliana Baggott wrote a smart and calm defense of the Osama bin Laden death celebration for NPR last week. Americans should be free to release their fear, she contends: their cheering shows they are paying attention, are emotionally invested, and are participating in an act of unity. She didn’t convince me, but she helped me […]

For a lifetime Mary Oliver has gently secluded herself, walked the woods, sent bottles out on the tide bearing simple messages that reconnect humanity to a beauty beyond us. Now we know why. In an interview with Maria Shriver Mary Oliver reveals she was sexually abused when very young, that with eroded trust she withdrew […]

I left the daily life of journalism at the turn of the Century, just before the daily life of journalism collapsed. That left me feeling a bit like Charlie Chaplin, who sold all his stocks in 1928. Since then I’ve maintained journalism as a practice more cyclically, and less cynically, focusing more on reporting and […]

The genius of James Fallows’ new piece in The Atlantic is that he takes some of the best values of traditional journalism—skepticism, research, fairness, eagerness to question authority and topple conventional wisdom—and he applies them to traditional journalism. He disputes the tediously common view that old journalism is better than new. Unless they are different from […]

Last week when my friend David Alm published his lament of digital publishing in these pages, I happened to be writing an introduction for a visiting writer. I recognized in my draft a soft rebuttal to David’s post, but I decided it had to complete its original mission before I could post it. This introduction […]